Lenovo IdeaPad U300s Up For Pre-Order, Already Back-Ordered

Lenovo put its IdeaPad U300s ultrabook up for pre-order on its company online store. Soon enough, many buyers found themselves to have back-ordered it. The initial few waves of orders got December 19 as the expected shipment date, the rest will have to wait for at least another few weeks. Not only is the U300s back-ordered, but it's also that the winter break is falling in between that period. The only model available for orders is a 13.3-inch one powered by Intel Core i7 ULV processor, with up to 4 GB of memory and 256 GB of SSD storage. The fact that this $1999 model is being sold at a sweet web-price of $1499 could be driving the rush.

Intel Core i7-3960X and i7-3930K CPUs Transitioning to C2 stepping in January

As previously reported, Intel's first wave of Sandy Bridge-E processors have VT-d (Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O) disabled due to an errata in the C1 stepping. That issue couldn't be resolved in time for the launch but it's getting fixed with the C2 stepping which is set to start rolling out to customers on January 20th, 2012 (samples have already been delivered).

The CPUs moving to the C2 stepping are the hexa-core  (3.3 GHz) and Core i7-3930K (3.2 GHz). Beside the fixed VT-d, the C2 chips will feature new S-spec and MM numbers so a BIOS update for current motherboards will likely be required.

Intel Core i7-3770 Put Through 3DMark 06, Cinebench, and Fritz Chess

An increasing number of people within the industry have access to Intel Ivy Bridge engineering samples. Some of them are generous enough to share performance details with the public. One such kind soul posted 3DMark, Fritz Chess, and Cinebench test results. An Intel Core i7-3770 sample was the test candidate, this chip has all components and features available to Ivy Bridge LGA1155 enabled, including HyperThreading, a faster uncore, and the full 8 MB L3 cache. The chip was put through 3DMark 06 (to test its CPU and iGPU performance), Cinebench 11.5 (both single-thread and multi-threaded), and Fritz Chess Benchmark (again, both single and multiple threads).

More screenshots follow.